On March 28, 2025, the sec­ond edi­tion of the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI) Ren­dezvous Con­fer­ence was devot­ed to the issue of AI tools in human resources (HR) man­age­ment and as a train­ing tool.

This annu­al event brings togeth­er researchers, indus­try pro­fes­sion­als, Mas­ter’s and PhD lev­el stu­dents and pro­vides an oppor­tu­ni­ty for them to dis­cuss the top­ic of the day. ‘With­in Heudi­asyc, part of the “Knowl­edge, Uncer­tain­ty, Data” team led by Ben­jamin Quost and Sébastien Dester­cke is con­duct­ing research on uses of AI in train­ing pro­grammes. We also have a ‘CAVE’, i.e., an immer­sive sim­u­la­tion plat­form ded­i­cat­ed to the devel­op­ment of inno­v­a­tive tools for train­ing. We are also home to the ‘Safe AI’ Chair, which enables us, among oth­er things, to show­case the research car­ried out at UTC in this nov­el area,’ says Audrey Coor­naert, trans­fer spe­cial­ist engineer.

The AI Chair also show­cas­es the exper­tise of its spon­sors. Sopra- Ste­ria, a long-stand­ing spon­sor, recent­ly joined by Work­day, a com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in appli­ca­tions for HR man­age­ment, among oth­er things. This explains the issues addressed dur­ing this sec­ond event, which fea­tured a num­ber of con­fer­ences on var­i­ous AI tools, a round table and, last but not least, sev­er­al work­shops demon­strat­ing vir­tu­al real­i­ty VR train­ing tools.

Among the lec­tures? ‘One was devot­ed to MEM­O­RAe, a tool devel­oped at UTC-Heudi­asyc by Marie-Hélène Abel. It is a web plat­form aimed at man­ag­ing all the het­ero­ge­neous knowl­edge resources cir­cu­lat­ing with­in an organ­i­sa­tion. Anoth­er, pre­sent­ed by Pierre Gous­set and Leslie Abkar­i­an from Work­day, focussed on ‘The advent of skills-based organ­i­sa­tions’ or how AI is redefin­ing the world of work. Final­ly, a third pre­sen­ta­tion, enti­tled ‘Open edu­ca­tion for more con­trolled AI’, was giv­en by Col­in de la Higuera, pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nantes and hold­er of a UNESCO Chair,’ explains Audrey Coornaert.

Among the work­shops demon­strat­ing vir­tu­al real­i­ty train­ing tools is Kiva, a project launched in 2014 and car­ried out as part of a part­ner­ship between UTC-Heudi­asyc, Revi­at­e­ch, a spin-off of UTC and Mon­tu­pet, a com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in the man­u­fac­ture of alu­mini­um cylin­der heads for the auto­mo­tive indus­try. ‘Mon­tu­pet had a spe­cif­ic prob­lem to solve: their employ­ees had spe­cif­ic skills in clean­ing moulds and it was dif­fi­cult for them to train new recruits in skills that can­not be explained on a black­board. The envi­ron­ment – heat, noise – does not allow for tra­di­tion­al appren­tice­ship train­ing. With Kiva, the aim is to cap­ture expert move­ments as a train­ing ele­ment in an indus­tri­al envi­ron­ment. Under the super­vi­sion of an expert train­ing offi­cer the appren­tice can repeat the move­ment vir­tu­al­ly until they have mas­tered it,’ explains Romain Lelong, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Reviatech.

MSD